Physics has a persistent drive toward final explanations: grand unified theories, “theories of everything,” ultimate laws, and ultimate constants. While intellectually ambitious, treating these constructs as ontologically ultimate is misleading.
This is the distortion: the pursuit of theoretical finality is mistaken for the ontological closure of reality.
The Physics Move
Grand unified theories aim to consolidate forces, suggesting that the universe’s structure is ultimately reducible and complete.
String theory and multiverse proposals often imply ultimate explanatory frameworks.
Cosmology’s search for a “final state” or a “theory of everything” frames reality as a closed, fully determined system.
Why This Overextends Ontology
Finality suppresses the open-endedness of relational actualisation:
It implies that the becoming of reality is ontologically arrested once a final theory is discovered.
It privileges formal completeness over the contingent, emergent, and perspectival aspects of phenomena.
It risks conflating epistemic ambition with ontological necessity.
The distortion lies in reifying completeness: what is a methodological horizon is misread as a feature of being.
The Relational Reframing
From a relational standpoint:
Reality is open-ended and perspectival; relational actualisations continue beyond any model or theory.
Theories of everything are symbolic frameworks, useful for mapping patterns but never exhaustive of relational possibility.
Recognising finality as epistemic aspiration rather than ontic fact preserves the ongoing dynamism of existence.
Thus, finality is intelligible — but only as a methodological goal, not as an ontological constraint.
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